Apple blames software bug for developer portal gaffe – CNET

Apple said late Wednesday a software bug caused its developer site to suffer what some initially perceived as a security breach.

The portal, which allows developers to manage their accounts, suffered an outage after displaying some developers’ home addresses incorrectly, according to reports. Speculation that the site may have been hacked was due to addresses being changed to reflect a location in Russia.

Some developers tweeted out seeing the same erroneous address for themselves and others as well.

Further confounding the mystery was the misspelling of the Russian city of St. Petersburg as “Saint-Petesburg” and inclusion of its former name of Leningrad.

In an email late Wednesday, Apple’s Developer Program Support team sought to assure developers that nothing nefarious had occurred and their accounts were safe.

“Due to a bug in our account management application, your address information was temporarily displayed incorrectly in your account details on the Apple Developer website. The same incorrect address was displayed to all affected developers,” the team said in the email, obtained by CNET.

“The underlying code-level bug was quickly resolved and your address information now shows correctly,” the team said. “There was no security breach and at no time were the Apple Developer website, applications, or services compromised; nor were any of your Apple Developer membership details accessed by, shared with, or displayed to anyone.”

The episode was reminiscent of an outage the site suffered in 2013 when the crush of developers eager to download newly released preview versions of Apple’s next iOS and OS X software brought the portal to a screeching halt.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the incorrect address displayed was a misspelled city in Russia.

Apple representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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